Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Man-ga Sounds Better Than Mon-ga

2023-Jun-11

Lightweight changes on today’s update. Fixed the legend order in the 24 hr view chart so that the colors match their order. There is a bunch of code cleanup that has nothing tangible to show on a HTML page I serve, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Especially on my module where I make charts using Plotly. There was a lot of dead weight I needed to cut off there just to reduce the amount of scrolling I was doing whenever I worked over there.

There was one bit of SQL I used that gave me pause after it executed. For reasons I have yet to discover, occasionally my new_artist_catalog_entry function that gets triggered sometimes in my daily jobs will make a duplicate record. There were two instances that I remembered and checked after the DELETE …. WHERE= command. They’re gone, and I’m rather sure the code did not delete more than artists that had more than one entry. However I realized I don’t have a super steady backup system for my database. Right now my backup style is what I call ‘unintentional data mesh’. I have copies and versions of my database all over the place. What I lack is some sort of ‘data dictionary’ that I can check to make sure my data somehow did not get warped. My baby already could be damaged goods!

Managed to finish most of that last 100 Bullets volume in one night. The artist and writer were not tired of their creation at the end of their run; a symptom I’ve seen in several long spanning DC/Vertigo books that kept the same writer/artist. I used to think Steve Dillon’s work in Preacher was subpar at best until I read the first volume. I read Transmetropolitan in the right order so I got to see Darrick Robertson slide into bland delivery of characters he once loved enough to take the time to put in well thought out pages. Or maybe there were editorial forces at work miring their work. Anyway, Risso is still very much in love with dark figures cutting through bright color dialog panels swimming in even darker backgrounds.

Enough about what I like about 100 Bullets. I remembered feeling dissatisfied with reading this years ago, when it was fresh. I had hoped a second look might change that. It had not. Not really. My larger complaint about the series is the answers to the really cool noir mysteries from the beginning are not even close to being believable. The stakes to the game being played once felt like a cosmic game only understood by the real elites. By the end I felt no gravity at all to what these characters were trying to achieve. Maybe I should give it an actual 1-100 issue re-read, but the series does not give more than a handful of concrete examples of how The Trust operates, let alone interacts with anything that isn’t in the USA. I think the creators were too in love with depicting really really cool looking hitmen with the coolest backstories and coolest nicknames that they didn’t care how they were stuffed into a plot about elites secretly manipulating American society.